MIDNIGHT SUN

Astronomical rule number one: There is one universal truth in that stars will die.

Astronomical rule number two: There is nothing human beings can do about rule number one.

Stars are the engines of the universe. These huge bubbling balls of superheated gas burn for so many years that we find it difficult to comprehend the timescales involved, and with such an intensity that the pressures and forces within are enough to transform matter and create all of the other elements including the ones that are necessary to build people like you and me.

They are the necessary raging infernos that create the stable gravity fields and other circumstances that make any form of life even possible. Without them we are quite literally nothing and all of the matter that makes up our tiny insignificant bodies was once born in the blazing heart of an exploding star. We are, as the man said, literally stardust.

But whether your preference is for the poetic or the scientific, rule number one still applies.

Light from the distant stars can take thousands or even millions of years to reach us, meaning that we are only ever really looking at things as they once were and not as they are now. Any of the stellar phenomenon that we are able to witness will have happened so long ago that they are probably over, and it is perfectly possible that many of the stars we see in the sky that guide our ships or, if you choose to believe such things, our destinies are not even there any more and haven’t been for as long as humanity has mapped the skies above its head.

We form then into patterns and constellations and they are so far away that those constellations still look exactly the same whether you’re standing on the moon or whizzing around in an orbiting space station, but all of the constituent parts might be as far from each other as they appear to us to be from here.

I sometimes wonder what constellation our own tiny diamond in the sky is part of when you gaze back upon us from Rigel or Epsilon or Betelgeuse? Sometimes I wonder what the creatures of Rigel or Epsilon or Betelgeuse would even call themselves. Probably not Rigellans, or Epsilonians or Betelgeusians, I’m sure. Whatever it is, it is unlikely to be in a form that we truly understand, no matter how many gold records we clamp to our deep space probes with the general sense of hope that our friendly aliens might have record players that spin at exactly 33 and one third RPM. After all, even now there aren’t that many record players of that type in the average home, and many of us struggle with other languages spoken by people who we share our planet, our DNA and our basic fundamental similarities with.

Actually, if our predictions are correct, we’d better hope that the Betelgeusians have got themselves the hell out of there, assuming that they were ever there in the first place, although, with the cycle of starlife being what it is, if they were ever there, its likely that they were extinct billions of years ago anyway.

Alas, poor Betelgeusians. We never knew thee… Your crimson skies and silver smoke are lost for all time, as your red giant flickers at the top right hand corner of what we think of as Orion. One day, possibly quite soon now, that red flicker in our skies will burst into bright light and outshine everything else in the night sky for a few short weeks as a kind of midnight sun, one last glorious hurrah, before you flicker and fade to memory and we start to redraw our starcharts.

Because, like everything, stars will age and become weaker. This is not the sort of thing that happens overnight of course. The entire span of human history might play out as we gaze upon a red giant going through its protracted death throes, but all stars start to get old, just as one day ours will. When its fuel starts to burn out, its gravity field weakens and so it expands and consumes anything orbiting relatively closely to it. When this happens to our sun, that will basically be the proverbial “it” for planet Earth and it will be perhaps left to the Epsilonians or the Rigellans to lament our passing.

Once that has happened, massive gravitational forces will cause the sun to collapse in on itself and release a massive burst of radiation that might outshine an entire galaxy for a very short while, burning as much fuel in those last few weeks (or whatever its observers, if any, might call their segments of time) as it did during its entire lifetime, and then it will be all but gone, blasting out all those various elements, all the atoms that made up you and me and our entire solar system into the universe around us, maybe one day to form part of a new cradle of life orbiting a star that hasn’t even been born as yet.

You can currently see a supernova burning if you look up on a clear sky into the pinwheel galaxy just beyond the handle of that old astronomical favourite the Plough. I’ve not yet seen it myself as the skies around here remain almost permanently cloudy at the moment. It’s already passed the brightest its going to ever be, and being 21 million light years away it’s never going to dominate our night skies or look like anything other than just another flickering light to the naked eye, and it was dying a long, long way away whilst our distant ancestors will still working out how to walk on two feet, but, perhaps, we should take a moment to pause and watch as it passes, burning out its last message to anyone lucky enough to see it: “As am I, so you will be.”